JADS Limited (England)

History

A brief history of JADS digital signage

The development of the JADS Digital Signage began in
2004 to solve a specific digital signage requirement in the electronics
department at the University of Kent, England.

The department
purchased a large plasma screen for the foyer to display information to
students entering the building. It was hoped that the screen could
display important announcements such as canceled lectures and classes
to reduce the burden on staff and scraps of paper to relay
information. The idea was let down by lack of software tools to make
it happen. Initially Microsoft PowerPoint presentations were created but it was obvious straight away that updating
the content was going to be a problem.

With Microsoft
PowerPoint any change to a presentation requires slideshow mode to be
closed, the file manually edited and then slideshow mode restarted. The setup in the department made this impossible to achieve because
there is no desk or easily accessible input devices near the plasma
screen.

What was required was a remote method of updating the
screen. One method of remotely updating the screen was to display a
web page that automatically reloaded content periodically. By updating
the web page on the server, new content could be displayed. The main
problem with this strategy was making the content fit the screen
correctly. It was impossible for students to scroll through
announcements on the screen so they needed to fit perfectly. Manipulating font sizes before display to fit the necessary space was
incredibly difficult because of different configurations for viewing
and editing.

The
first version of the JADS Digital Signage was designed to
read plain text announcements from a remote database and use the
available space on the plasma screen to display them efficiently. A
small Java Application was developed to achieve this task. The
requirement evolved into displaying a sequence of announcements in
addition to news items in separate panels. Later a staff list with
room numbers and telephone extensions was added, also read from a
database. Together with cycling background images, the electronics
department had an attractive and effective announcement display
system. To add or change content on the screen, the database could be
changed using Microsoft Access and the modification would appear
instantly on the plasma screen.

A few months later Keynes
College at the University of Kent purchased a plasma screen for the new
atrium of the building. After hearing of the success of the
electronics display software it was the natural choice for the new
screen. There were several hurdles to overcome however. Unlike the
electronics department, there was no database available to store and
maintain content for the screen so a new data management system was
required. Another problem was that content needed to be added from
number of departments on campus and there was no single person who
could take on this roll. The solution would need to make it possible
for a number of authors to add content from their personal computers.

Installing
custom software for sending announcements from the various systems
would have been time consuming and caused numerous problems because of
the limitations placed on computers connected to the University
network. It was decided that the best strategy would be to couple the
display system with a web server. By serving custom form elements on
web pages, a web browser on any computer could be used to post content
to the screen.

The
development took several months due to the complexity of linking the
full screen graphics components to a multi-threaded web server and
content management system. The announcement display system, written in
Java, was given the name JADS and issued to Keynes college in 2005.

Several
additional enhancements were added in this new version. Announcements
were no longer restricted to plain text. Images could be uploaded and
displayed on the screen. JADS took care of rescaling and displaying
the images in the available space alongside other components. The
layout of items on the screen could also be controlled through the use
of templates and switched within the web based user interface.

Further
interest in JADS prompted the development of a more flexible design
using emerging technologies. RSS feeds were used to encapsulate
collections of multimedia announcements. RSS opened up the possibility
of reading news and other information from the Internet and displaying
it on the screen. Additional custom components were developed such as
the analogue clock and live updating images for webcam image
streaming. Another improvement was the ability to cycle through
multiple templates with customisation options available.

In
2006 the Architecture Department at the University of Kent requested a
version of JADS customised to display timetable data. This new
requirement prompted a major rewrite and many additional features
were added.

JADS version 4 can display timetable data for up to 10
concurrent timelines and provides a user interface to add events
from a standard web browser. Timetable images are dynamically created
and can be served to be used elsewhere on the local Intranet. Another
major change to JADS was the slide designer. Previous versions had the
ability to change the template used for positioning items but queuing
multiple template designs for sequential display of specific items was
impossible. Version 4 of JADS provided a more familiar slide creating
structure to other presentation packages such as Microsoft PowerPoint. The web based user interface was significantly improved with
live updating previews.

By 2009 Kent University had purchased many more screens and positioned them all around campus. The hospitality department, which maintains the majority of the screens at Kent University, outlined a requirement for a system where announcements of images and text could be added centrally with control over which screen showed announcements from a single interface. In July 2009 JADS Limited was formed to develop a new version to satisfy this requirement, to bring JADS up to date with new technologies and provide a commercial digital signage solution to other businesses.